Do feel free to friend me -- I shall be thrilled*. And do feel free to unfriend me -- I shall not be hurt. Though, if you are a real-life friend I'd like to know why -- because if I hurt your feelings I'd like to mend that, and if I didn't I'd like not to have to fret :)

I'd also love it to pieces if you tell me a bit about yourself, if I'm unlikely to know you from your lj name (my lj powers are weak). At some point when I'm finding it a bit less overwhelming, I'll be friending people back; I just haven't the focus to figure it all out just now.

I think that's everything for now :)

* ETA: Though, please read this before deciding if you want to friend me, because I am not necessarily going to make you comfortable, and I am entirely out of patience with so-called allies who only want validation & cookies.

1) I'm an Indian national. And, yes I live in the US now, but I didn't when I wrote the post. And I've lived in a lot of countries; US-centrism is a phenomenon I've encountered in all of them. (Consider the impact of white Americans getting killed. The whole world is expected to care. It's just not true for anyone else - unless it plays conveniently into existing bigotries/narratives of course.)

2) Percentage is irrelevant. Americans' position (in the absence of other context) as global prototype human has to do with their global power and prestige, and their extremely effective imperialism.

3) Going back to college-educated - if I were American, I probably wouldn't have thought to put that modifier on the list. Like I didn't think to put college-educated on the list. The default is unmarked - and the way I fall into my own categorical trap is in the things I don't notice.

----

Having said all that - prototypes absolutely do vary between people & communities, based on experience; and relevant categories and thus prototypes do absolutely shift with context. Take all generalizations as exactly that.

Apparently my post here has recently turned up on Making Light, BoingBoing, and Metafilter.

(Which of course makes me wish I'd written it better! And as one commenter on BoingBoing TOTALLY correctly points out, I left out college-educated in my listing of what makes the prototype. Which is not a coincidence at all; we tend not to think about the ways in which we ourselves are prototypical/default.)

But it also means I'm filtering non-friend comments now. Because we get gems like this: [edit to add: so far this is the only one. It's just of a type I've seen frequently elsewhere.]

"As a non-academic cis white male of 54 who knows he's benefitted from this subconscious categorical thinking but who - I SWEAR - has always been a skinny long-haired "weirdo" not accepted by authority figures and who has followed closely the work and books by Boroditsky, Lakoff, and Feldman, I read this and sigh: what can I possibly say, except I AM A FUCKING ASSHOLE whose made everyone's live worse by being who I look like?

I did not bother noting on the comment that this sort of defensive response is a form of oppressive behavior - an attempt to silence the speaker of unpalatable things. But I will note it here, as a thing not to do.

I won't be unfiltering any other such comments; this one can stand in as a token for the lot. If I get too many for my spoon level, I'll just close comments. But I would prefer not to be silenced - and to have worthwhile conversations in comments silenced - by oppressive behaviors.

I realized I never posted my drawing of our noble friend the mippo to lj.buddhistmippo is an excellent model; stays still and his smile never looks forced. He's the first drawing from life I've done in over a decade, how did that happen?